


Three-Time

by anomieow



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 06:53:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28541358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow
Summary: “It’s—a nice, neat thing to know,” Billy says. “I’d practice when I was alone.” This is true. In a hazy shaft of light in his garret bedroom, stooped so as not to strike his head, he’d sometimes trot a methodical box-step. It was neither the romance nor the grace of the thing, but its order; the mercy of its repetition. One might enter a space outside of time; each turn twin to the one before. It was as though there was always, somewhere, a room in which he might be found waltzing and he only had to step into it to meet himself there. (His mother characterized him as a lonely child, but she was wrong: he was a solitary one.)“And when you weren’t alone?”“Jealousy is unbecoming of you, Cornelius. You get a face like a kicked pup. All stung-looking and wide-eyed.”“I’ll show you a kicked pup—I know a fine long greyhound could use a swift boot to the ribs.”“Oh, darling. I’m not in the mood. And anyway, there’s no one else now, is there?”“Is there?”
Relationships: William Gibson/Cornelius Hickey
Comments: 15
Kudos: 42





	Three-Time

“Come, I’ll show you.” His hand extended.

“I don’t care to learn.” 

“You just don’t want me to lead.” A quirked eyebrow, an incremental lift of the lips beneath his thick, neat mustache. How his eyes soften imperceptibly from sharpness to sly warmth. Cornelius rises to his feet. 

“Once you learn,” Billy continues, “you can lead. Now, put your hand up on my shoulder—there—good. The waltz is a simple dance.”

“Where did you learn, then?”

“Never you mind. Now, this—”

“You’ll tell me one day.”

“Jesus, Cornelius. I may as well tell you now, else you’ll dog me to death about it.”

“Oh, I was just curious.”

“Please. I can see you turning green, ridiculous man. ‘Twas a neighbor girl. Taught me to amuse herself.” 

“It’s certainly stuck well.”

“It’s—a nice, neat thing to know. I’d practice when I was alone.” This is true. In a hazy shaft of light in his garret bedroom, stooped so as not to strike his head, he’d sometimes trot a methodical box-step. It was neither the romance nor the grace of the thing, but its order; the mercy of its repetition. One might enter a space outside of time; each turn twin to the one before. It was as though there was always, somewhere, a room in which he might be found waltzing and he only had to step into it to meet himself there. (His mother characterized him as a lonely child, but she was wrong: he was a solitary one.) 

“And when you weren’t alone?”

“Jealousy is unbecoming of you, Cornelius. You get a face like a kicked pup. All stung-looking and wide-eyed.”

“I’ll show you a kicked pup—I know a fine long greyhound could use a swift boot to the ribs.”

“Oh, darling. I’m not in the mood. And anyway, there’s no one else now, is there?”

“Is there?”

“As though you’d not trade me for that roustabout marine in a moment.”

“Not a bit, Billy. Truly.” He pauses, and then, his eyes dancing, “I do like a head of curls though.”

“The waltz,” Billy says sharply, sliding his hand down into the shallow tuck of Cornelius’ waist. “I step forward, like so—my left foot. And you, with your right, step back. Good. We move in three-time.”

“We’ve no music.”

“We’ll make the best of it. Three-time.”

———

Cornelius kisses the inside of his thigh, his knee, the freckled hillock of his shoulder, but nearly never his mouth. It’s not a gesture Billy misses until it’s Cornelius who doesn’t do it. Cornelius who talks of making him his bride when he’s hilt-deep in him, Cornelius who promises him wedding rings. It feels like so many coins thrown into a well.

Not that he doesn’t think he means it: but he’s a hard little man, and no matter what he wishes for it comes back to him as an echo, a splash.

Three-time. Their breath falls into three-time when they fuck, and Billy likes to imagine it as a kind of waltz. Parquet floor, heavy velvet curtains tied back with gold cord. A quartet playing. _We’ll make the best of it,_ he’d said, but to tell the truth he misses music terribly. He’d not heard it often but when one dances one should have it. He did not like things done in parts: when one fucks, one should kiss. When one kisses, it should be the upon the lips. And if men are to know each other they should do so wholly; they should be naked together. They should know one another’s bodies so they don’t mistake one another other for beasts. All Billy knows of Cornelius is his neat pink prick, its coppery nest, the luminous, dwarf-like handsomeness of his face. His hand, his boot. 

Later, when he’s stripped for his lashing, Billy is astonished by Cornelius’ dense, clustered musculature. He’d thought he was all skin and bone under there, all rib and rope. Belly like a tea saucer. Instead, he’s compactly strong—sleek and rippling and certain, like a dog with a cruel master. 

“Shh,” Cornelius hisses now, slowing the neat, hard pistoning of his hips. He’s got his hands spanned over the taut dip of Billy’s waist and now, as though to give teeth to his words, he clenches in with his nails. “Someone’s coming.” 

There’s a shuffling step on the ladder, and then here’s Lt. Irving, peering into the dark with eyes smothered hot, like candles just blown out. 

———

Lieutenant Irving has his hand on Billy’s knee as he tells him all about Cornelius Hickey, the devious seducer. What he says is not altogether true and it’s not quite false; like all fated things there was a compulsion to it that transcends blame. From the moment they met, Cornelius striking up conversation over a shared cigarette above board one of the fair, early days, it was clear what would happen. Yes, Cornelius had this way of looking at him, a gaze warm and sly and inviting, but Billy—Billy recalls moments of looking back at him the same way, heat in his cheek and his gaze (which he normally kept studiously shuttered) softening. He knew even as he gestured at resisting him that it would happen. 

He’d dreamed, in those early days, of standing in a high open window, the wind singing at his knees and nose, tipping forward, forward. Or like this: the thing about waltzing in three-time is that the beat falls an eyelash short of time enough to execute the steps, so between the two partners vibrates this small, bouncing pull and if one will waltz at all one must move in this broken surging beat, even as, to untrained eye, it seems a stately and slow dance. It seems clear who is leading. But the dancers know better. 

Not that any of this would matter to Irving. Irving asks what, exactly, they do together; how it works. He starts to sweat, leans in closer. His hand weighs heavy on his knee.

———

Tozer’s many things Billy’s not: muscular in a proto-masculine kind of way, one evolutionary step from pounding his chest in a jungle somewhere; he’s commanding in the grunting, stomping way of a beast too. His attractiveness is of the conventional kind—broad, milk-fed. A whiff of the rustic about him, as though despite his evident vanity one might faintly scent manure in the nooks of his body. 

He’s also dumb. It pains Billy to think that that’s what Cornelius wanted all along, somebody lovely and stupid and easily cowed, for as much as he adores him he’d not be any of those things—especially the lattermost. Most infuriating are Tozer’s attempts to fake being the one holding the leash. One should not deceive oneself about the kind of man one is. Like out there alongside the boat, preparing for the walk-out. _You’ve just given me permission for a good shove._ Idiot. Billy nearly laughs aloud. But then Cornelius gives Tozer that disgusting up-and-down, charting the bulky sullen _fact_ of him as he french inhales. Peacock. He never tried to court Billy so. 

_False,_ Billy chastises himself. Only after it was over between them did Cornelius slip that mysterious ring onto his finger, his eyes all dancing. 

Later, huddled against one another in a tent beneath one blanket, Cornelius sees the ring around his neck. He lifts it to the light of the guttering candle, turns it in his fingertips. He can feel the scant, damp warmth of Cornelius breath on his lips and it is very nearly a kiss. 

“I meant it when I gave you this, you know.”

“What, exactly, did you mean by it?” He makes his voice as glacial as he can manage for the roar of his blood. 

“Well, for one thing, I’m sure Sol’d be a terrible dancer.”

“It’s too late for this.” _Too late. If you kissed me now you’d taste copper in my teeth._

Cornelius cocks his head, smiles softly, lifts his mouth to Billy’s. A single, chaste glide of the lips.

“Dance with me, Billy,” he says, standing up and extending his hand.”

Billy thinks for a very long time before he drops his gaze to his knees. “Don’t be stupid, Cornelius,” he says. “We haven’t room.”

“We’ll make the best of it.”

Billy stands, stooping so his mouth grazes Cornelius’ hair. He lets Cornelius lead, and is touched he remembers the steps. They waltz a few tight rings, Cornelius humming off-key. Then he kisses him again and leaves the tent. 

(In the morning, there’s a new bruise on Tozer’s neck, a plummy, amorphous shadow in the shape of an open mouth.)

———

In the dream they cling together tightly, their bones interlocked like key’s teeth and lock tumblers, and he can’t tell if they are _in flagrante_ or in a mortal struggle or just pressed together against the cold, or maybe they’re just dancing in a crowded room: yes, that’s what they’re doing. They’ve got their quartet at last, their curtains with braided cord. But from the far end of the room comes dark like seeping watercolor, a rolling streaky blackness, and when he wakes it is not darkness at all but pain, pain, pain. A crystalline pinching in his knees and elbows. He goes to see Goodsir.

Rather, he goes to see the man he understands to be Goodsir. This man in their camp is not the awkward, genial stammerer who gave him his physical; not he who enthused over crustaceans with carapaces no man had seen before: he recalls him once pulling him aside to show him, waving one over-sized claw angrily, a crab with a shell the speckled cream and red of some kind of yardbird. Showed _him,_ Billy, because he was there and Goodsir was brimming with love for it, this new quick thing caught in a bucket. (Billy had given him a tight smile and walked on, Irving’s bedding wadded and wet from the wash on his hip.) 

Now with a gaze immeasurably indifferent, and a queer trace of pleasure in his voice, Goodsir delineates to Billy the agonies of his imminent death. Billy doesn’t mind. He deserves it because he did not love the crab, perhaps, or because he did love and chose badly, or because—his brain is fevered, his thoughts like: he can think of nothing. He stares emptily past the good doctor. He has never been vain, exactly (though he was once—it feels a lifetime ago—possessed of a certain fastidiousness that might be mistaken for vanity) but now he wonders if he looks as wretched as he feels. Carved, hollow: once he saw an egret’s ribcage that predators and the wind had picked clean. For a moment he mouths at something, but then Cornelius is there.

He thinks of nothing as he gazes down at him, his eyes the color of surf, except perhaps— _how lovely you are, little and glittering._ And, _I wish I’d kept you._ Easy to say, now that Irving’s gone, one hopes, to his gracious and beloved maker. His bones turned up like broken china beneath the shale. Billy wonders, not for the first time if it wasn’t, in part, an act of vengeance—did Hickey care enough for such a thing? Then: Hickey’s eyes swim as he peers up at him, like, like: it feels like—dizzy, he feels, as Hickey disappears, for just a moment; when he returns it is with a knife neat through his ribs—what was it he felt when he looked in his swimming eyes that last time? _It was pain, it was love, it was pain._


End file.
